From The New York Times, we learned Tuesday the latest revelation involving President Donald Trump’s norms-busting presidency — that he wanted to order the prosecution of a pair of political rivals.

The paper reportedthat Trump told his White House counsel, Donald McGahn, that he wanted criminal investigations of vanquished 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton and former FBI Director James Comey.

McGahn, according to the Times account, pushed back and, ultimately, presented the president with a memo indicating that he lacked the authority to order such investigations. The memo reportedly delved heavily into the political ramifications and warned that the Department of Justice might ignore an order; that judges might dismiss charges brought under such circumstances; and that voters might toss him from office.

As a political matter, the memo is spot on. It is ill-advised for many reasons for the president to involve himself directly in specific criminal matters — particularly when it covers conduct by the president’s political rivals. The optics are all kinds of bad. It smells of the shenanigans in Third World dictatorships.

It would open a predictable cacophony of abuse-of-power criticisms. And it may well lead judges to dismiss indictments.

But unconstitutional is not a synonym for “bad idea.” There are plenty of truly awful ideas that, nonetheless, do not offend the Constitution. Those are better defeated in the political sphere.

And this may be one of them.

Proponents of the “unitary executive” theory of the Constitution point to Article II, Section 1 of the founding document: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”

The statement is elegant for its simplicity and directness. All of the powers of the executive branch are placed in the hands of the president. Not a committee. Not underlings. Not Cabinet secretaries. Not the sprawling bureaucracy.

The president — personally and individually.

The powers conferred to a single person are awesome. It is one of the reasons why there are so many strong checks on the powers elsewhere. But when it comes to running the executive branch, the president — and the president, alone — is in charge. Everyone else who works in the executive branch exercises power on his behalf.

This makes sense from a constitutional standpoint. The Justice Department, itself, is not mentioned in the Constitution. Congress created it by statute in 1789. So the attorney general and the vast array of lawyers the department employs are not free agents. They work for the president.

The president cannot order his government to take unconstitutional actions. But any power granted to the executive branch is implicitly granted to the president.

So, if the attorney general can determine that Clinton’s handling of classified emails deserves another look or that Comey’s conduct as FBI director was somehow improper, then by definition, the president can reach the same determination and order his underlings to launch an investigation.

Again, this is not to argue that it is wise for the president to do so. There are many good reasons for insulating the president from the day-to-day decisions of the career officials at the Justice Department. They have the professional knowledge and expertise that he lacks. Direct involvement by the president in specific cases is bad politics. Beyond that, it erodes public confidence in the justice system, and that consideration ought not be underestimated.

Some conservative and libertarian scholars have rethought their position on the Constitution in the Trump era. Ilya Somin, a professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, argued earlier this year that the executive branch over the years has taken on such enormous powers not originally contemplated by the founders that it makes sense to disburse and diffuse the president’s individual power.

“If the executive branch still wielded only the relatively narrow range of powers it had at the time of the Founding, the case for the unitary executive would be very strong (at least on originalist grounds),” he wrote. “Unfortunately, however, the current scope of executive authority goes far beyond that.”

Somin makes a reasonable case for amending the Constitution to limit presidential authority. But the originalist view of the Constitution is that it means the same thing in different times and different circumstances. Its meaning does not change just because circumstances or the resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. do.

The framers seemed to agree. During debate over whether the president could remove a Cabinet officer, James Madison argued that the president must have that authority if he is to be able to carry out his constitutional obligations.

“If the duty to see the laws faithfully executed be required at the hands of the Executive Magistrate, it would seem that it was generally intended he should have that species of power which is necessary to accomplish that end,” he argued.

If the president can remove an executive branch officer, without the advice and consent of the Senate, surely he can instruct that same officer to carry out an executive action.

And what is to prevent a rogue president from tossing his political enemies in prison as in tinpot dictatorships? The genius of the Constitution. An independent judiciary, free from the control of the executive, would stop prosecutors from filing charges without merit.

And if a judge did allow such charges to go forward, there is the most important check in the justice system — the jury, comprised of regular citizens with no stake in the outcome of the case they decide.

So Trump seems to have the power to order up a criminal investigation if he wants one. But that doesn’t make it a good idea. ​